Destructive women and the men who can't leave them: pathological dependence or pathological omnipotence?

Clinicians have focused more on the troubling issue of women who are dominated and abused by men than they have on those occasions where men are abused by women. While usually not involving physical abuse, the destructiveness of some women, expressed in terms of harsh and destructive verbal and interpersonal behavior can be so striking and persistent that it should remain of interest to psychoanalysts. This clinical paper examines two examples of male patients who, while accomplished in many spheres of their lives, are nevertheless engaged in marriages to women whose hateful behavior toward them is impossible to deny. Despite considerable awareness of how much they are damaged by their wives, they are either unwilling or unable to utilize separation and divorce as tools to protect themselves, with the ultimate goal of starting life again free of the persecutory other. The dynamics involved for men stuck in such dyads are considered, including the possible negative role of a systems approach to couples' therapy that assumes mutual responsibility for the couples' dysfunction and distress.

When interpretation derails the patient: the negative impact of certain misuses of the concept of the unconscious.

Alternatives to classical psychoanalytic theory and technique have existed in the form of various "deviant" schools, all of which have found that contemporary conflict theory fails to achieve good results with the patients they treat. While the principles of interpersonal, self-psychological, intersubjective and relational schools are reasonably well known through the psychoanalytic literature, the opportunity to examine detailed analytic accounts by classical analysts has only recently become possible. The publication of full case reports has recently become a feature of the traditionally based psychoanalytic journals. This paper makes use of a recent volume of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly to examine the interpretations made during a lengthy analysis of a male patient struggling with his ambivalence about marrying his fiancée. The analyst repeatedly attributes his patient's reluctance to marry and negative feelings about his fiancée as determined by his unconscious conflation of his mother and his fiancée. The author attempts to demonstrate the derailment of the patient by these interpretations. They prevent him from solidifying his own judgment and, in so doing, prevent him from taking suitable action. An alternative approach to the material of the case is presented, including very different interpretations that would, in the author's opinion, liberate the patient rather than derail him from achieving his life goals.